Product Labeling, The Newest Attack on Israel

From Aipac

In November 2015, the European Union (EU) took the calculated step of imposing new labeling guidelines on certain Israeli exports produced in areas that came under Israeli control during the defensive 1967 Six-Day War. Though billed as mere “compliance” with long-standing European policy, the EU’s new foray into labeling marks a significant step in a dedicated campaign to pressure Israel into sensitive, unilateral concessions to the Palestinians. The EU’s action—taken outside the context of peace negotiations—is designed to impose Brussels’ vision of Israel’s future borders. These commercial attacks against Israel increase the prospect of isolating the Jewish state, while strengthening its most vitriolic critics and slowing the pursuit of peace.

Europe has pursued a policy of "differentiation" for nearly a decade—treating Israel as two distinct entities, one legitimate, one not—often cast in the mundane language of law and commerce. To wit, though Israel's first free trade accord was with the European Union, and it remains Israel's largest export market, the EU in 2004 disqualified Israeli exports produced in areas acquired during the Six-Day War from the preferential treatment afforded all other Israeli products.

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Drug for rare muscular dystrophy fast-tracked

Israeli company BioBlast targets orphan diseases that traditional pharmaceutical companies won’t touch.

By Abigail Klein Leichman for Israel21c

Treatments for extremely rare medical conditions are few and far between. The number of cases of “orphan diseases” doesn’t justify the amount of cash needed to get a pharmaceutical developed, tested and approved.

This is exactly the niche that Tel Aviv-based BioBlast Pharma was created to fill in 2012. Now its three experimental platforms are moving closer to market.

Cabaletta, BioBlast’s lead product for treating two rare and currently untreatable conditions — oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD) and spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (SCA3) — received Fast Track approval in June from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to expedite the drug’s development, review and potential approval specifically for treating OPMD.

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You have to see what was just uncovered in Jerusalem!

Incredible archaeological discovery brings Bible to life.

Dr. Eilat Mazar has unearthed a new discovery from her latest archaeological excavation in Jerusalem: the bulla of King Hezekiah of Judah. The clay seal stamped with Hezekiah's name was found in the royal quarter of the Ophel and marks Mazar's newest biblically related find.

The inscription on the bulla reads: "Belonging to Hezekiah [son of] Ahaz, King of Judah."

Watch this video about King Hezekiah's seal.


 


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Why the Maccabees Aren’t in the Bible

The books that tell the Hanukkah tale didn't make it into the Hebrew Bible -- but they are in the Catholic one.

By Rachael Turkienicz for MyJewishLearning.com

The First and Second Books of Maccabees contain the most detailed accounts of the battles of Judah Maccabee and his brothers for the liberation of Judea from foreign domination. These books include within them the earliest references to the story of Hanukkah and the rededication of the Temple, in addition to the famous story of the mother and her seven sons. And yet, these two books are missing from the Hebrew Bible.

In order to begin addressing the question of this omission, it is important to understand the formation of the Hebrew biblical canon. The word “canon” originally comes from the Greek and means “standard” or “measurement.” When referring to a scriptural canon, the word is used to designate a collection of writings that are considered authoritative within a specific religious group. To the Jewish people, the biblical canon consists of the books found in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible).

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The new Jewess: A rising generation of actresses overturns old tropes

by Danielle Berrin for JewishJournal

The year is 1950. The setting is a dimly lit movie studio backlot. It’s the middle of the night, and an attractive young woman named Betty Schaefer is explaining to her screenwriting partner why she became a writer instead of what she really wanted to be — an actress. The movie is “Sunset Boulevard.”

“I come from a picture family,” Schaefer (Nancy Olson) tells Joe Gillis (William Holden). “Naturally, they took it for granted I was to become a great star.  So I had 10 years of dramatic lessons, diction, dancing. Then the studio made a test.  Well, they didn’t like my nose — it slanted this way a little. I went to a doctor and had it fixed.  They made more tests, and they were crazy about my nose — only they didn’t like my acting.”

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The Pilgrim Family: A Jewish Perspective On Thanksgiving

Arnold M. Eisen For The Blog/Huffington Post

With assistance from the phenomenal memory of a friend of mine from high school days, I can still recall the essay I wrote for 9th-grade English class about Thanksgiving. "Of Bands and Bullwinkle," I called it, the reference of course being to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and the balloon of my favorite cartoon character. The tone, my friend and I presume, was a combination of mild disapproval that a solemn occasion intended for the collective expression of gratitude to God had become a day devoted to parades, football and filling up on turkey--and real affection for the parades, the games, and especially the turkey. Parenthood and middle age have only increased my affection for all three. I liked Thanksgiving a lot when I wrote that piece, and still do.

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For great ideas, visit our Hanukkah Holiday Spotlight Kit

The Talmudury Tales

Women without underarm hair, transvestites seeking illicit sexual relations, lepers who can’t shave, nazirite gentiles, grape-eaters, and other Chauceresque characters, in this week’s ‘Daf Yomi’

By Adam Kirsch

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

Throughout Tractate Nazir—whose end Daf Yomi readers approached this week—there has been a very natural assumption that the only people who can become nazirites are Jews. Indeed, it never occurred to me that it could be otherwise: Isn’t naziriteship a part of Jewish law, as laid down in the Torah? Yet in Nazir 61a, the rabbis point out that the textual basis for naziriteship, in the Book of Numbers, is not crystal clear on this point. The subject is introduced with the words, “Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: When a man or woman shall clearly utter a vow, the vow of a nazirite, to consecrate himself to the Lord.” The phrase “speak to the children of Israel” seems to imply that what is to follow—the rules and restrictions of naziriteship—is intended for Jews only.

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How a Holocaust legacy helped launch the Kind bar brand

By Gabe Friedman for JTA.org

In many respects, the Manhattan headquarters of Kind Snacks — the purveyors of the omnipresent fruit and nut bars found everywhere from health-food stores to office-supply emporiums — are pretty much what you’d expect: Scads of casually dressed millennials mill about sleek, brightly colored rooms adorned with inspirational quotes from the likes of Desmond Tutu and Groucho Marx.

But step into the office of founder and CEO Daniel Lubetzky and there’s a different vibe. The furniture is older, and a Time magazine cover on one wall featuring the face of Anwar Sadat stands out. Lubetzky tells JTA that his desk and the artwork on the walls belonged to his late father, a Holocaust survivor who had a deep effect on his life and business philosophy.

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“What would have been if?” – HaDag Nachash on Rabin z”l

In collaboration with the Rabin Center, top Israeli band HaDag Nachash have just released a brand new song for Rabin Memorial Day.

Entitled “What would have been if?” the song remembers and laments.






Here is our translation, officially endorsed by the band:
The past we know, some of us even remember
How a few moments after the end of the speeches
We were all as one fixed to the receivers
Until the message reached our ears – and left us without words or utterance
And with a slightly bashful glance we were sucked back into the cycle
Of wounded and licking and wounded and flogging – like a wave

But you should know, that there are moments
When I see high above the Cypress trees
And above the heads of my exhausted People
A bubble floats and inside three words:
“What would have been if?”

The present is known with no need to expand
How it drains and shakes how it pressures with no quiet
And how every winter we race after the left-overs of the left-overs
Because maybe in the summer we’ll be running to the bomb-shelters

But know that there are moments
In which I see high above the Cypress trees
And above the heads of my exhausted People
A floating tear and inside three words:
“What would have been if?”

And our untrustworthy future what does it have in store
What more can it bury
Your Six Days blossomed a hundredfold
And nowadays not only we declare victory
And to think that you had the courage to change
And to think you knew how to plant hopes
And to think that you raised up to fly and went far enough to see
And to think that you managed to understand:
“What would be if…?”

On eve of biennial, 9 things to know about Reform Judaism

By Uriel Heilman for JTA.org

Some 5,000 Reform Jews will gather Nov. 4-8 in Orlando, Florida, for the biennial conference of the Union for Reform Judaism. With about one in three American Jews identifying as Reform, the movement constitutes America’s largest Jewish religious denomination. Read on for more about the movement, its leadership, and its connections to Cincinnati, Detroit, Scarsdale, New York, and, yes, Mattoon, Illinois.

1. The movement is led by a pilot and a dancer — both from Scarsdale

Two of Reform’s three main institutions, the Union for Reform Judaism, the congregational arm, and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the flagship rabbinic school, are led by men who hail from the same synagogue: Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale. Both men, rabbis Rick Jacobs of the URJ and Aaron Panken of HUC, also have unconventional hobbies. Panken is a licensed commercial pilot and has a degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University. Jacobs, who stands 6-foot-4, is a former dancer and choreographer.

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A Conversation With Gillian Laub

The photographer talks about ‘Southern Rites,’ her HBO documentary and companion book project about racial tensions in small-town Georgia

By Elisa Albert for Tablet Magazine

For her HBO documentary Southern Rites, photographer Gillian Laub spent 12 years getting to know the community of Mount Vernon, Georgia, home of one of the last segregated proms in America. Laub was first sent to photograph the town’s segregated homecoming parade for Spin magazine, which had received a letter from a disgruntled high-school student begging the media to pay some attention. Many in town were not thrilled to have a photographer on the scene. The homecoming eventually integrated, but the prom remained stubbornly segregated. The situation so haunted Laub that she returned many times on her own over the following decade-plus. What unfolded thereafter—including the killing of a young, unarmed black man by a much older white man, and a campaign for sheriff that left a beloved black candidate mysteriously not victorious—came as a shock to Laub. Produced by John Legend, the documentary premiered in May. Jon Stewart called it “affecting,” and the New York Times said it was “riveting.” Now Laub has published a book with the same title, which, in addition to showcasing her nuanced photographs, uses artifacts, letters, transcripts, and narrative to further illuminate the story of a community rife with injustice, complicity, and occasionally some hope as well.

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The Twilight of French Jewry, the Twilight of France

French Jews are emigrating to Israel by the tens of thousands. Their departure isn’t just about them; it’s about the end of the French idea.

Alain El-Mouchan for Mosaic

“If 100,000 Frenchmen of Spanish origin were to leave, I would never say that France is no longer France. But if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.” Thus declared Prime Minister Manuel Valls to the National Assembly in January 2015, within days of the homicidal jihadist attacks in Paris on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket.

What prompted this impassioned declaration? It is true enough that increasing numbers of French Jews have been leaving for Israel. In the past five years alone, more than 20,000 have done so, and since 2012 the annual figures have been moving steadily upward. Still, the French Jewish population, standing at about 480,000, remains the largest in Europe, and the latest surge, following as it does upon earlier, smaller movements of French Jews to Israel, is a far cry from the Prime Minister’s alarmed figure of 100,000. Is so massive an outflow really imminent, and, no less important, is there a sense in which the departure of a cohort of 100,000 Jews would truly mean the failure of the French political model of republican governance—that is, of France itself?

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Jewish Routes // San Francisco

by Sala Levin for Moment Magazine

San Francisco, the gleaming mecca of all things tech, got its big break during another era of innovation: the Gold Rush of the mid-19th century. Before then, several hundred people lived in Yerba Buena, which became San Francisco in 1847, after the territory was seized by the United States during the 1846 Mexican-American War. After gold was discovered in 1848, the population began to explode. Jews were among the first people to arrive; coming mostly from Bavaria, they sought both to escape anti-Semitism at home and to set up new businesses in a just-beginning-to-boom town. “In many ways, they were the founders of San Francisco,” says Jackie Krentzman, executive producer of American Jerusalem, a documentary film about San Francisco’s Jewish history.

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Hospitality on Sukkot - Ushpizin

From the iCenter

One of the shalosh ha'regalim (שלוש הרגלים, "three pilgrimage festivals"), Sukkot is rich with customs, symbols and a long list of mitzvot to fulfill. Of these mitzvot, hachnasat orchim (הכנסת אורחים, "welcoming guests") and matan tzedakah l'aniyim (מתן צדקה לעניים, "giving tzedakah to the poor") – while important all year round – are given special importance during Sukkot.

Sukkot is associated with hospitality. We welcome friends, family, and the community into our sukkah and we visit others. We eat, we sleep, we study, and we spend seven days and nights in the company of neighbors and friends.

We also invite Ushpizin (Aramaic for "guests"). According to tradition, each sukkah is blessed with visits by seven honored guests, shepherds of the nation: Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron and David. A more modern tradition is to invite the Ushpizot: Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Avigail, Hannah, Huldah, and Esther. The Usphizot were chosen based on the Babylonian Talmud, which lists seven biblical women who were prophetesses.

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The Personal Prayer at the Heart of the High Holy Days

“Here am I, poor in deeds,” it begins. Where did it come from and, more importantly, what does it say to us?

Atar Hadari for Mosaic

Just before the start of the musaf (“additional”) service in Ashkenazi synagogues on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the prayer leader chants a personal entreaty begging God to be merciful to His people, gathered at this season in repentance of their sins. The prayer is known by its opening words hineni he’ani mimaas, “Here am I, poor in deeds. . . .”  In all of halakhic literature there seems to be only one reference to it, by Rabbi Ephraim Zalman Margolis of Galicia (1762–1828), who wrote:

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 The High Holidays are upon us, check out our High Holidays Spotlight Kit

What millennials believe

By Cristela Guerra for The Boston Globe

FRIDAYS AT DUSK, Casper ter Kuile, 28, begins his “tech Sabbath.” He puts his iPhone away. He lights a candle and sings a song. From sunset to sunset, he unplugs from technology and reconnects IRL, “in real life.”

This ritual is how he resets after the work week. It’s a time to walk, read, and meditate. It’s also part of his training as a minister for non-religious people. In conversations and relationships, ter Kuile, a master’s candidate at Harvard Divinity School, seeks substance and depth beyond the digital realm.

Like nearly one in three millennials, ter Kuile is not affiliated with an individual house of worship. He loves to create communities of meaning and belonging, but hasn’t found a home inside an established church. He might find fulfillment in reading Harry Potter as a sacred text, as he will at a book club he’s leading every Wednesday starting Sept. 30 at the Harvard Humanist Hub. Or discussing the significance of gratefulness at Thanksgiving.

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For Orthodox, Addiction Is Unspoken Problem

Rachel X. Landes for The Jewish Daily Forward

On the surface, Asher Ehrman had a great childhood in Monsey, New York. Growing up in an Orthodox family, his parents loved him and his sister. It had its ups and downs, but until he was about 13 or 14, he really couldn’t complain.

But then he came home wearing a blue shirt instead of the usual white and his parents kicked him out of the house to protect his sister’s shidduch , or marriage prospects and future. Ehrman went to live with his friend, whose mother took him in for the next three years.

Ehrman says, “Life is a bit of a blur from then on.”

At 19, Ehrman smoked marijuana for the first time, and within six months he was popping Adderall pills, and then Oxycontin.

He says now that he fell into the wrong crowd, but at the time he really didn’t think so. After all, “they were all guys in yeshiva,” Ehrman said.

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What Does it All Mean? Glossary of Jewish & Hebrew Words

From Mazeltot.org

Latke? Mechitza? Mohel? What does it all mean?

Here we offer definitions of some Jewish and Hebrew words you may have heard before. If there's a word you'd like defined, email Josh Gold. For more information about Jewish holidays, terminology and teachings, visit www.myjewishlearning.com.

Aleph-bet: The Hebrew alphabet

Aliyah: The honor of being called up in synagogue to read from the Torah - or - a term used to describe Jewish immigration to Israel

Avodah: Work, often used in reference to work that serves God

Bar/Bat Mitzvah: A 13 year old Jewish boy or girl who is seen as an adult in the eyes of the Jewish community - or - a religious ceremony in which a 13 year old boy or girl reads from the Torah and/or leads a prayer service for the first time

Birkat Hamazon: Grace after meals

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Named for Fiddler on Roof’s Anatevka, new village to house Ukraine Jewish refugees

Fleeing conflict, 100 residents set to move in next month; Kiev rabbi raises $6 million for first phase

By JTA

A prominent Ukrainian rabbi and Israel’s ambassador to Kiev attended the groundbreaking ceremony for a village for Jewish refugees from the conflict raging in eastern Ukraine.

At the ceremony earlier this month near the village of Gnativka, which is located 15 miles from the country’s capital, Israeli Amb. Eliav Belotserkovsky watched as cement trucks poured the foundations for the village, where 100 new residents are expected to settle next month, the village’s initiator, Rabbi Moshe Azman, said Friday.

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Israel and Japan Are Finally Becoming Friends. Why?

After decades of wariness, the two nations are being drawn together by common interests and shared fears.

By Arthur Herman for Mosaic

Walk down a side street in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Eshkol and you may came across a group of students chatting loudly in Hebrew as they review their Bible lessons of the day. Hardly an extraordinary sight in Israel—except that these aren’t Israelis. They’re young Japanese on student visas who have assumed hybrid names like Asher Sieto Kimura and Suzana Keiren Mimosa. And they’re Makuyas: members of a Japanese religious group that’s been fervently supportive of Israel since 1948.

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‘Commie Camp’ Documentary Captures Camp Kinderland’s Idealism, and Its Imperfections

Once a utopian getaway for children of socialists and left-wing organizers, the camp remains an essential haven for ‘weird Jews’

By Nona Willis Aronowitz for Tablet

A 12-year-old professes his love for the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton. A middle-schooler defines the “buffer zone” mandated around an abortion clinic, a regulation won by the Center for Constitutional Rights. A 9-and-a-half-year-old explains that Hannah Senesh “went to Pakistan during World War II, and she parachuted into Hungary and tried to save her country, but she got caught by the Nazis and was killed.”

These are a few of the slightly dorky, very adorable, comically precocious city kids at the heart of Commie Camp, a new documentary about a Jewish socialist summer camp in the Berkshires called Camp Kinderland, premiering June 28 at VisionFest. OK, so the kids get a few facts wrong (Hannah Senesh went to Palestine, not Pakistan). But, in the words of Katie Halper, a Kinderland veteran and the film’s director: “How many female anti-fascist paratroopers who suffered capture, torture, and death in an attempt to free her country from Nazi invasion can you name?”

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The Penniless Immigrant Behind a Hot Dog Empire

By Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse

Coney Island is famous for its seashores, sideshows, and salty breezes. But, of course, it’s also famous for its hot dogs—Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, that is. You may know it as the site of the similarly famous gut-clogging hot-dog eating contest.

Just in time for the iconic Brooklyn hot-doggery’s centennial is Famous Nathan, a new documentary by Lloyd Handwerker, grandson of Nathan Handwerker—yes, that Nathan.

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Lilith, Lady Flying in Darkness

The most notorious demon of Jewish tradition becomes a feminist hero

By Rabbi Jill Hammer for MyJewishLearning.com

“Half of me is beautiful

but you were never sure which half.”

            Ruth Feldman, “Lilith”

Lilith is the most notorious demon in Jewish tradition. In some sources, she is conceived of as the original woman, created even before Eve, and she is often presented as a thief of newborn infants. Lilith means “the night,” and she embodies the emotional and spiritual aspects of darkness: terror, sensuality, and unbridled freedom. More recently, she has come to represent the freedom of feminist women who no longer want to be “good girls.”

Biblical and Talmudic Tales of Lilith
The story of Lilith originated in the ancient Near East,where a wilderness spirit known as the “dark maid” appears in the Sumerian myth “The descent of Inanna” (circa 3000 BCE). Another reference appears in a tablet from the seventh century BCE found at Arslan Tash, Syria which contains the inscription: “O flyer in a dark chamber, go away at once, O Lili!”

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The Life and Death of Steven Sotloff, Part 2

A reporter’s friends use Facebook to try and save his life: Driven by a growing sense that the U.S. government could not or would not save Sotloff from captivity, a group of family members, colleagues, and Jewish communal leaders coalesced into a ragtag—and tragically unsuccessful—rescue effort.

By Jonathan Zalman for Tablet Magazine

This is part 2 of The Life and Death of Steven Sotloff. Read part 1 here.

***

A Year in Captivity

Late one Saturday last fall, I met Gregg Roman, the director of the community relations council for the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh, in the lobby lounge of the DoubleTree hotel in midtown Manhattan. Roman, 29, was in town to attend a meeting of the board of directors for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. He and Sotloff met as students at the IDC, in Herzliya, Israel, while Roman was trying out for the debate society.

“It’s not enough for us to learn about [the Middle East] in class,” Sotloff would say to Roman as they puffed away at Romeo y Julieta cigars and took in the view from his friend’s apartment—Lebanon to the north, Jordan to the east, Egypt and Gaza to the south. “We have to go there to really understand what’s going on.”

On his way toward my table, Roman ran into Ronald Halber, the executive director of the Jewish Community Council of greater Washington, and invited him to sit with us. Halber, I was told, was the main point of contact for all governmental and Jewish media relations for the family of Alan Gross during his imprisonment in Cuba. “That could be your next story,” he said.

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The Life and Death of Steven Sotloff, Part 1

How a freelancer’s Heaven turned into Hell: Inspired by a blend of bravery, wanderlust, and humanism, a budding journalist ventured—without the kind of institutional structure and support that would have been common a decade ago—into an inflamed Middle East.

By Jonathan Zalman for Tablet Magaine

On July 15, 2013, Steven Sotloff arrived in Israel, a place he once called home. He planned on spending a week there, beginning with the wedding of his former roommate Benny Scholder, before heading off to report from Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and wherever else his vagabond reporting career might take him in the region.

It was familiar territory. In just under three years—from September 2010 to August 2013—Sotloff had published over 30 articles in 12 different publications while reporting from eight Middle Eastern countries. As a frontline freelancer, Sotloff often managed to be in the right place at the right time. He found and highlighted voices of marginalized people, and his writing rarely shied away from explaining deep-rooted and often ancient conflict. He witnessed violence and life under long-standing despotic regimes. He witnessed uprisings and civil revolutions, war and death. He was attacked and jailed. He found hope and he lost hope. He was often broke.

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Akhenaten and Moses

Did the monotheism of Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten influence Moses?

Robin Ngo for Bible History Daily
Defying centuries of traditional worship of the Egyptian pantheon, Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten decreed during his reign in the mid-14th century B.C.E. that his subjects were to worship only one god: the sun-disk Aten. Akhenaten is sometimes called the world’s first monotheist. Did his monotheism later influence Moses—and the birth of Israelite monotheism?
In “Did Akhenaten’s Monotheism Influence Moses?” in the July/August 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, University of California, Santa Barbara, emeritus professor of anthropology Brian Fagan discusses this tantalizing question.

Egyptian King Akhenaten, meaning “Effective for Aten”—his name was originally Amenhotep IV, reigned from about 1352 to 1336 B.C.E. In the fifth year of his reign, he moved the royal residence from Thebes to a new site in Middle Egypt, Akhetaten (“the horizon of Aten,” present-day Tell el-Amarna), and there ordered lavish temples to be built for Aten. Akhenaten claimed to be the only one who had access to Aten, thus making an interceding priesthood unnecessary.    

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Zumba’s Jewish Matron Saint

By Shannon Sarna for Jewniverse

One day in the mid-1990s, dancer and choreographer Alberto “Beto” Pérez forgot his usual music for the aerobics class he taught in Bogotá, Colombia. In a pinch, he reached for his favorite salsa tape and taught the class like a dance party. He and his students had so much fun that he gave it a name— “rumba”—and began teaching it all the time.

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Too Late for Moses: New Israeli App for Stutterers

Haifa-based startup has picked up a handful of innovation awards and has sparked interest from around the globe.

By Arutz Sheva staff

An Israeli mobile app that uses the world’s first stuttering detection algorithm to help stutterers overcome their condition comes 3,500 years too late for the most famous Jewish stutterer, Moses, but not a moment too soon for present day sufferers of the condition.

NiNiSpeech is a mobile health solution that helps people who stutter (PWS) maintain fluent speech, and allows speech-language pathologists (SLP) to monitor their clients’ fluency in everyday settings, Yair Shapira, founder & CEO of NiNiSpeech, told ISRAEL21c.

The mobile solution, which will cost $50 to $100 monthly, provides the stutterer with immediate feedback on speech fluency by means of a buzz or vibration. This gives the stutterer a chance to monitor performance, improve fluency, achieve speech goals and gain rewards. The second stage of the solution, which is unique in the field, measures stuttering.

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